“And the girl?” Mordred asked.
The dragon coiled hot and slow behind my ribs as we watched Tristan speaking quietly to her, calming her in a way no one else had attempted. I watched her.
“Leave her,” I said.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
-LANCE-
Ice crusted the stone in the corridor and Galahad’s bedchamber sheets, and the air bit at exposed skin.
But it was the expression on Guinevere’s face that gutted me, even if I wished it hadn’t, because she wasn’t the one who was bleeding, and Galahad hadn’t caused the ice that was raging around us. It was fairly obvious that she’d attacked him.
But, why?I thought the question to myself.And why now, after all this time?
Tears ran down her face and froze on her jaw, but she didn’t seem to even notice they were there. Instead, her eyes were blazing open and aimed at nothing.
I wanted to go to her. Fuck, it took everything in me to remain standing in the doorway when every protective instinct I had told me to shield her, to protect her.
No. She’s the enemy. And she might have very nearly killed Galahad.
That voice in my head that was trying to remain logical was the only reason I stayed in the doorway, as did all the others, including the king.
I remained here not just because of the ice, though a shard had already taken a chunk out of the wall six inches fromArthur’s shoulder. Strangely, he hadn’t even flinched, which told me he was either braver than I’d given him credit for or too furious to have noticed it. I stayed because going to her now, in front of all of them, would cost more than it helped. That was the rational argument anyway. Rational or not, I kept turning it over in my mind like a coin I was repeatedly flipping, hoping it would change.
It didn’t change anything.
Then Tristan arrived and walked right in as if he had a written invitation, and I watched Arthur’s jaw tighten at the breach of it. But Arthur said nothing.
He stopped an arm’s length from her, but he was still close enough that a shard of ice grazed the air beside his ear. He didn’t even seem to notice it.
“You don’t have to carry this alone,” he said.
He didn’t touch her; he just stood there. And he was completely still in the middle of a room that was still tearing itself apart, with ice crashing into the walls and water roaring in circles around them both. Yet he just stood there as though this was somewhere he was perfectly comfortable being.
The spiraling slowed. I watched it happen and couldn’t explain it because his magic was death magic. It had nothing to do with water. And yet, the columns of water were clearly losing their urgency, and the ice shards now hung suspended instead of launching. Guinevere’s breathing, which had been ragged enough to hear from the doorway, started to calm.
I’d faced many things in my life and hadn’t flinched at most of them. And yet, as I stood in that doorway and watched them, watched him reaching out to her, and watched her eyes land on him, I felt something pull tight in my chest. It wasn’t something good.
He extended his hand, palm up.
Something moved across her face then. The blaze in her eyes dimmed, not all at once, but like a fire running low on fuel. Her hand came up, and it was shaking. Her knuckles were scraped raw, and I found myself wondering why.
Are you mad?I railed at myself.She just very nearly murdered Galahad, and you’re concerned about her fingers?
She reached for Tristan’s hand, and their fingers met. Almost instantly, the maelstrom stopped.
It wasn’t a gradual dying down or winding down the way a storm does either. It literally just stopped the moment her skin touched his. Every shard of suspended ice dropped at once and hit the floor at the same time that every column of water fell flat. The temperature bottomed out for one sharp moment and then began to climb back toward something livable. Guinevere stood in a flooded, destroyed, half-frozen room holding Tristan’s hand, and the only sounds were dripping water, her breathing, and the distant pop of ice contracting against stone.
Then her legs gave out from under her, and I felt myself start to move forward, moving against the idea of her falling against the stone floor. But I was too late. Tristan’s arms came under hers, and he held her up, as she pressed her face against his chest and shook. She wasn’t crying. No, she was just shaking, as if her body was settling a debt it had been running on borrowed time to pay.
He held her there, and neither of them said anything. And all of us just stood where we were and watched them. I glanced over at Arthur and found him conversing with Mordred, and then his gaze moved back to Guinevere, and his eyes narrowed. I had no idea what he was thinking.
I looked away, and not because anyone was watching me. I looked away because I had to, because I was afraid that if I continued to watch them standing there in the middle of theroom and if I continued to see the way she was looking at him, my body would simply cave in on itself.
I’d known jealousy before. I’d felt envy over titles, honors that weren’t bestowed on me, envy of the kind of easy certainty other men seemed to carry that I’d spent twenty years trying to manufacture in myself. But this jealousy wasn’t that. This was the particular agony of watching another man hold a woman your heart had already, without permission, claimed. It was the pain of watching another man doing the thing you should have done even as you reminded yourself why you hadn’t.
I could have gone to her. I’d arrived here before Tristan had. I’d pushed through the throng of onlookers until I was first in the doorway. I could have entered that room and taken her in my arms and calmed the tempest. But I hadn’t.
